GBK Kokkola

The Gamlakarleby Bollklubb, short GBK, is a football club from the western Finnish town of Kokkola (Swedish Kokkola, formerly Gamlakarleby ). Currently, he plays in the Kakkonen, the third highest league in Finland. The club plays its home matches at the 3,000 -seat Central plan in Kokkola.

History

GBK was founded in 1924 and is thus one of the oldest football clubs in Finland. He is regarded as the club of the Swedish-speaking inhabitants of the bilingual city of Kokkola, while local rivals KPV ( Kokkolan Palloveikot ) is regarded as the club of the Finnish-speaking inhabitants.

Until about 1950 GBK offers soccer, was active in the sports of ice hockey and bandy. 1953, merged the Hockey departments of GBK and KPV and founded the new club Kokkolan Hermes.

The football team GBK rose three times, 1958, 1963 and 1975, in the highest league in Finland, the Mestaruussarja on. 1959 and 1976 it went straight again, from 1964 to 1966, the club played three years in first class and reached the 1965 season with his best finish rank 4. In addition, GBK was long, most recently in 2007, active in the second division.

GBK today

Today his activities organized bilingual association focuses on soccer. The first team plays since 2008 in the third-class Kakkonen. In addition, GBK is also in the women's and junior level and actively providing a total of 30 teams with a total of about 600 registered players.

Kokkola Cup

GBK is also known as the host of the July annual Kokkola Cup, an international football tournament for youth teams. In recent years, each more than 300 teams took part in the four- day tournament and made the Kokkola Cup after the Helsinki Cup second largest tournament of its kind in Finland.

The Kokkola Cup was first held in 1981 with about 50 teams. Since then the number of participating teams has increased to up to 330. Overall, the number of participating teams was 1981-2009 about 5000. Among the nearly 100,000 players participating were numerous later professionals, including Craig Bellamy, Danny Mills, Simon Davies and Matthew Etherington.